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  • Cosmology and Logic in the Dao of Changes by Baoshan Ma
  • Michael Harrington (bio)
Baoshan Ma. Translated and with commentary by Haiming Wen and Christine A. Hale. Cosmology and Logic in the Dao of Changes. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2019. xliv, 185 pp. Hardcover $68.00, isbn 978-0-8248-5638-0.

This English book, based on The Cosmology of the Way of Change (Yi dao yu zhou guan易道宇宙观) published in 2014 in China by Ma Baoshan马宝善, is less like a scholarly translation and more like a small edited volume or a set of conference proceedings. Six authors in addition to Ma himself contributed pieces to the book, resulting in a total of four prefaces and five appendices. These additional materials are considerable, adding about two thirds to the length of Ma's original text. The translation of this original text is also the work of many hands. Although Haiming Wen and Christine A. Hale are credited [End Page 92] as the translators, Wen notes that he produced the translation with the help of a number of scholars over the course of several seminars and conferences (pp. xxxii-xxxiii).

Of these additional contributors, Chung-ying Cheng casts the longest shadow. The title page says the translation was "revised by Chung-ying Cheng," though no indication is given of the nature and scope of these revisions. Cheng's is the first of the four prefaces, and it contains some of the distinctive hyphenated vocabulary, such as "natural-cosmological changing event-images," familiar to readers of his past writing on the Yijing 易经 or Book of Changes (p. xi). The translators note that Cheng recommended that they translate "basic substances" (benti 本體) as "onto-generative beings," and indeed this and other idiosyncratic translations pervade the book (p. xiv). The influence of Cheng will certainly help to decide the book's audience, as Cheng has developed his own independent vocabulary, readership, and community of Yijing scholars.

The book as a whole reflects the self-referential character of this community. Chung-ying Cheng and Li Xueqin provide the only blurbs on the book's back cover, and they are also the authors of the first two prefaces. Wen then relies on them to validate the importance of the book, saying "it is clear that Ma's theory is pioneering in opening a new direction about the dao of the Book of Changes since Professor Chung-ying Cheng and Professor Li Xueqin, who are leading scholars on the classic, have confirmed Ma's contributions to this" (pp. 141-142). Throughout the book, there is a striking absence of references to scholarship on the Yijing, whether in Chinese or English, other than references to Ma's previous work. And even these references contain only an English title without publication data. Notably missing is the Chinese publication data for the very work translated here.

The interpretive materials that surround Ma's original text make striking claims about its connection to Chinese culture. Both Chung-ying Cheng and Li Xueqin support Ma's claim that Fu Xi, King Wen, Laozi, and Confucius were the creators of the Yijing. Cheng calls this claim "reasonable and historically accurate" (p. xv). Li devotes about half of his own preface to defending it (pp. xxii-xxv). For Li, at least, this question of authorship is connected to the Yijing's authority. He quotes Ma as saying that "the study of the dao of the Book of Changes is precisely at the root of the great cultural tree" (p. xx). The logic of the Book of Changes gains in importance, and may be regarded as more essentially Chinese, if we agree that it was written by the renowned Chinese sages of antiquity. The final appendix, by Dong Guirong, pits this logic of the Yijing against the West, saying that it is "by far superior to the numerous Western major philosophical schools by its scientific characteristics, universal applicability, conciseness, comprehensiveness and thoroughness" (p. 176). By comparison, "Hegel's dialectics is only degenerative" (p. 177). [End Page 93]

For a book with the serious task of promoting the logic of this ancient Chinese text, the tone is often oddly lighthearted. Both the...

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